A two-minute animation done by myself and Sam Lin for a 1998 high school Latin history assignment, ported to “modern technology.”

Originally a 320×200-pixel, 16-colour affair, made with a bizarre mix of MIDI, WAV, GIF and FLI clips orchestrated through a Windows batch file. The graphics were mostly prepared in Autodesk Animator, a DOS-based computer animation and painting program from the ’80s; some were prepared in PaintShop Pro.

Sam did the story and animations; I did the logo, audio and stills and strung it together. Inside jokes that made sense to us at the time were liberally applied.

GIMP and SynthFont were used to convert the media into formats suitable for use with Scratch. The vinyl crackling is a new addition from the Partners in Rhyme blog.

Me: “…if I go to Coles and buy my own soy milk, will you make it with soy?”

Juice girl: “I have to check…yes, that’s okay.”

I go to Coles, purchase a carton of soy milk, then hand it to the juice girl. My dream of a smoothie with soy milk—as advertised—was realised. No discount for supplying my own ingredients. (I did get the remainder of the milk back though.)

One of my favourite times to work is really, really early in the morning.

Practical perks include enjoying your lunch break while everyone else is still making their way to work, finishing when others are going to lunch and being free in the afternoon to do whatever you please.

But to be out and about before sunrise is why I keep doing them—I simply can’t find a way to describe how beautiful I find the serenity, the near silence, the way the shadows fall and the colours of the sky as the sun prepares for the day.

And sadly, my phone camera struggles just as much to convey the real beauty of these moments as I see them. More »

I had a couple posts with more substance lined up, but they’re not ready. So, for the sake of publishing a post for December here are some of the videos I enjoyed enough during 2011 to bookmark. More »

I’m coming down a hill in a C-class tram in a 60kph zone. It has just started drizzling, which makes the tram more prone to slipping and dramatically increases the distance needed to stop, so I’ve reduced my speed to 45kph. An expensive black sedan pulls an illegal U-turn with no warning and then stops across the tracks because there isn’t room to complete it without reversing. I slam on the emergency brakes, go into a skid because of the weather conditions, and end up a couple metres behind him before he actually reverses out of my path. I come to a rough stop beside the car. Because the gong is automatically activated during the braking, the driver of the car assumes that I’m after his attention and tries to communicate with me through two layers of glass. Since I’ve already stopped, I figure I may as well entertain this.

Car driver: “What’s the issue?”

Me: “I’m in a 28-ton vehicle coming down a hill, and you have performed an illegal turn in front of me and then stopped.”